Here's a question from an Ask Pastor John podcast listener in Norway who writes in, "Hello Pastor John, thank you for all that you have done for the kingdom and for this podcast. I have a question regarding child rearing. You have formerly said that you would go to jail over the issue of spanking.

I agree with you that spanking is biblical, but in my home country, Norway, as well as in many other countries, spanking is illegal. The consequences would then not only be that one may have to go to jail, but that the government would take your children. This has now happened in the famous Boudinario case, where a couple in Norway lost their children after spanking them.

In cases such as these, one may never get one's children back again because the government may not see you as a suitable parent because you spanked your children. What would you do as a Christian parent in Norway? Wouldn't it be better to not spank your children and be sure that your children will never be taken away from you?

This is a big issue with huge consequences for us in Norway." Well, that's for sure. This is an important thing and has great consequence. And Norway is not the only country. You can go online and see a graph of the countries in Europe and around the world where it's illegal to spank, and that is only increasing.

I read about the Boudinario case, or however it's pronounced in Norwegian. I'm sorry if I'm butchering it. I read about that case some time ago and came away from it. The government took away five children from this family with, in my judgment, it seemed no evidence of child abuse.

I came away from that story feeling the way Jesus did in Mark 3, 5, where it says, "He looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart." Anger and grief, anger and grief, the mingling of those two emotions. You can't help but feel in this kind of situation.

All five children seized by the Norwegian government, and as far as I can tell, no evidence of child abuse. It's an ideological difference about the best way to raise your kids. And yes, I have said that I would go to jail over this. In other words, if they wanted to put me in prison because I believe that the best way to love my children was to spank them, sometimes when they were disobedient, I wouldn't sacrifice that conviction or that behavior to stay out of jail.

But of course, that kind of protest and threat is of no use when the person about to be put in jail is not yourself but your children. And yes, I know they're not being put in jail, but the point is it's similar. They're being legally kidnapped from the family and put in places they don't want to be.

And so the willingness of the parents to go to jail is not the issue anymore. So probably when I said that, I wasn't thinking as realistically as is proving to be the case. So the question for our friend in Norway, and other countries I'm sure, should we risk losing our children to the high-handed tactics of the state, or should we relent in spanking our children?

And of course, there are many related questions that Christians in Norway and other countries are facing, like what does a pastor preach? I don't know what the legal ramifications are if he preaches true biblical teaching. Does he tell the people what the Bible says and encourage them to obey, or does he just ignore parts of the Bible, or does he show them how to compromise?

How do parents teach their children the scriptures? Do they skip those parts of the Bible in telling their children how to raise their children? And if they teach their children, what will they say if the children say, "Well, why don't you spank us since the Bible says you should?" Now, of course, the issues are far deeper than simply the nature of parental discipline.

There is a view of human nature at work here that will have repercussions everywhere. There is a view of how to restrain bad behavior and get good behavior from children that the state evidently thinks is less psychologically damaging than simple, measured, loving spanking. And of course, the issue here is not merely how kids behave in later life.

Are they well-adjusted or maladjusted? That's not the main issue, but rather how they view the whole world, especially themselves and God. That's the great issue, which of course the Norwegian government does not take into account, but which is the most important issue in the world. God himself, according to Hebrews 12, uses corporal punishment, and treating kids differently will not serve well to help them know God and love God and believe in the God of Hebrews 12 and his holiness and his mercy.

Of course, governments don't take into account these great issues. They're only thinking at a very narrow, natural, historical, societal level, not a cosmic level, not an eternal level that includes heaven and hell and salvation and obedience to God and eternal destinies and the exaltation of the glory of God.

None of that matters to governments, but it should matter infinitely to Christian parents. So if I lived in Norway, what would I do? Well, I know I would pray earnestly for wisdom. I would not assume that this is a simple either/or situation. God is a God of wonders. God's a God of miracles.

He has ways out of dilemmas that seem hopeless. We can't think of any alternatives, but he can. He splits the Red Sea. That was an alternative nobody thought of. He stopped the sun in the sky. That was an alternative nobody thought of. He raises the dead. He walks on water.

All things are possible with God. So I would pray earnestly that God would show me a way to be obedient to God and keep, keep, keep my children. And if I really had to choose between spanking my children and losing them to the state, and I knew it was a necessary choice, of course, I would choose keeping my children over spanking them.

That's the answer he was looking for, probably. This is not choosing disobedience over obedience, because it would be disobedient to surrender your children to the state. One thing is crystal clear in the Bible is that God holds parents accountable for the raising of their children, not the state, which leads to one other consideration, and that is leaving a country where you can't exercise your faith legally.

America was founded by people who did that. They left their homelands so that they could exercise their faith in the way that they thought they should, and they were coming to an absolute wilderness, and half of them died in the process, which shows how important it was. And I have had people come to my church here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, from Europe, because they wanted to homeschool their children and weren't allowed to in the country they came from.

So I know it's happening today. So I will pray, I will pray for my brothers and sisters in lands like Norway, where increasingly unjust and evil laws put the Christian between two terrible choices. And we're all moving toward that situation, and we will need great courage and great wisdom.

Thank you, Pastor John. These international questions are so very helpful. Please keep them coming in to us. Email us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. And for parents who may not yet be convinced of spanking and what scripture teaches, I did an interview with Ted Tripp, the author of Shepherding a Child's Heart, the famous book.

You can see episodes number 442 and 443 in the podcast archive. You can find those episodes and nearly 900 others at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for making the Ask Pastor John podcast a part of your daily routine. We'll see you tomorrow. "The Godfather" is a production of the Center for God's Reconciliation.

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